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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9675811" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I think you're not quite understanding what I'm talking about.Most rolls in most games can, and probably with at least some of its output, move the narrative forward.in PbtA games it absolutely will. Very rarely is a roll allowed to simply say the status quo hasn't changed.Let me give an example.In many traditional games, if you attempt to pick a lock, a variety of different results can happen.  I'm going to generically say there are four of them, depending on the system.  You might get a crit, that picks the locks the lock and provides some extra benefit in the process of doing so (say, does so very quickly therefor not using up time that may matter for other reason); you might get a success, that picks the lock; you might get a failure, that uses up time but otherwise doesn't change matters (and that time loss may or may not be particularly relevant depending on other elements of the situation); and you could get a fumble which both fails and makes the situation worse in some fashion (say, making noise that attracts attention you may not want).  Some otherwise traditional games with a bit of a leg in a narrative camp might have one or two other cases: success that has a cost besides the time expenditures (takes extra time, say) or failure that still gets you somewhere (makes a successive attempt more likely to work).PbtA will very rarely leave things at the status quo (I want to say never, but I seem to recall one or two Moves in MotW that might have had a failure without other cost, usually because simply attempting the Move would move things just by trying).  In addition, the greatest likelyhood with most Moves is that there will be some sort of complication from attempting the Move, whether successful or not (you can push up your area of heaviest focus where unmixed success may be the likeliest case, but the others will still be fairly common).  This sort of pattern is not routinely the case with most trad games; in most trad games complications added to the situation if viewed as a failure state, just potentially a mixed one if the game is nuanced more.  With PbtA games its the expected result, success or not, and that's very much offputting to many people.I think this is a case where the devil is in the details.  What "failure" and "success" means matters, and the frequency matters.  To a large extent, structurally PbtA doesn't much care whether you succeed or fail, just that something happens (and to the degree it does, it actually considers at least some degree of failure a virtue) and I'm going to suggest that's miles away from what most trad games do and what many, probably most players want.</blockquote>

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